


Lies, Truth, Sith

by randomlyimagine



Series: Working on from Then to Now [4]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Ahsoka is the best okay, Gen, Mentioned Obi-Wan Kenobi, Sith Temple, Undercover as Sith, mentioned Mara Jade
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-13
Updated: 2018-09-13
Packaged: 2019-07-08 01:08:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15919851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomlyimagine/pseuds/randomlyimagine
Summary: “Not a step closer,Sith,” came Ahsoka’s voice.Luke turned and saw her standing there, even tenser than a moment ago, her lightsabers drawn and shining in the darkness.Because the only thing more complicated than being pulled back in time and meeting your not-yet-evil father and his friends is doing all of that while stuck undercover as a Sith and trapped in a Sith Temple. Featuring Luke, Ahsoka, and peace offerings.





	Lies, Truth, Sith

**Author's Note:**

> People said they were interested in reading snippets related to Under the Cover of Darkness, my longer fic (the first in this series) wherein Luke and Mara get sucked back in time to the prequel trilogy while undercover as Sith. For a long time, I was going back and forth between what I actually wrote, and a version where Luke, Mara, their marks (the bounty hunter and Inquisitor), Anakin, Obi-Wan, Ahsoka, Rex and Cody got trapped in the Sith Temple responsible for the time travel. It would have been darker and less interrogation-heavy, and this is a snippet of what that fic would have been, set a couple days after the time travel and the getting trapped.
> 
> You probably don't need to read Under the Cover of Darkness to understand this, if you don't want to, but you should read it anyway!
> 
> Enjoy!

Luke sighed, threw back his head, knew his fake-gold eyes were glinting in the dark of the Sith Temple where they'd all been trapped. And that was when the floor opened up beneath him.

A sudden loss of support. A choked-back yell. Gravity, pulling down.

On instinct, Luke reached out with the Force to steady himself, getting himself upright and slowed just in time to hit the stone floor without injury.

He looked up and saw Ahsoka across from him, tense, but having kept herself standing. She was the only other person that had fallen with him down to...wherever they were.

He looked up at the ceiling then, and saw nothing but black stone, thirty, maybe forty feet above them. Whatever opening had existed, it had sealed over completely.

“Not a step closer, _Sith_ ,” came Ahsoka’s voice.

Luke turned back toward her and saw her standing there, even tenser than a moment ago, her lightsabers drawn and shining in the darkness.

Internally, Luke sighed. It _was_ a good thing that he was apparently convincing, but…

He almost wished he hadn’t sold the act quite so well.

And to think, all he had wanted was a moment alone with Obi-Wan, to try to _explain_ , to get Obi-Wan to stop looking at him like a tortured animal: pitiable and dangerous. Now he was finally alone with one of the Jedi, with someone that thirty young lives didn’t depend on his ability to lie to. But it wasn’t someone he’d known before, someone he knew anything about with which he could prove his future knowledge or his real allegiance.

Ahsoka seemed wonderful and brilliant and so, so brave, but she was a teenager. And she couldn’t hide her fear of him to his face. He couldn’t risk the kid’s lives on her ability to conceal its lack, if he truly convinced her she didn’t need it.

Ahsoka was putting on a good show of bravado, but the red glow of emanating from the walls and the green light of her sabers was enough to let him see the paleness of her knuckles and the tautness of her mouth.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, putting his hands up in a gesture of peace that kept them far away from his own lightsaber.

“Yeah, well given that you apparently think being tortured is the best thing ever, excuse me if I don’t take your word for it.”

The painful thing was, that was a perfectly fair concern from her point of view. For a long moment, Luke didn’t know how to respond—not to the implicit accusation against Mara, and not to the obvious one against himself.

Eventually, he managed some words. “I don’t hurt children?” he tried. He really hadn’t meant for it to come out as a question.

Ahsoka just raised a dubious eyebrow. “Well, I’m not a child.”

But the truth was, however worried Ahsoka was about fighting him, about fighting the man the Inquisitor had boasted to be the corrupted Master of the Jedi Order—however much she even believed his story—Luke was equally worried about fighting her.

He knew only what he and Mara and his students had managed to scrounge up from old, forgotten datapads and holocrons, what they had adapted from other forms or taught each other, and what few lessons Yoda and Ben had managed to impart. So much knowledge was lost, with the result that Luke had no way to know where he stood. There was every chance that a Jedi Padawan from before the fall of the Order, one fighting on the front lines of a war every day, would be able to take him in a fight.

The war had given Luke far more respect for the capacity and maturity of teenagers than most sentients held, but that didn’t mean he approved of situations in which a minor had to fight.

Which raised one of the questions he’d been trying not to think about: What was the Jedi Order thinking, that they would send a sixteen year old to the front lines when they still had a Temple, when they had any other option?

“Look,” he tried again. But apparently he’d moved his hands too much in the accompanying gesture, and Ahsoka extended the longer of her two blades out of its crossguard position in order to point it at him. “Woah!” Luke jerked his hands back up. “Not attacking, I promise.”

Ahsoka’s eyes narrowed. “Keep it that way.”

“Listen, Ahsoka, I’m not going to hurt you,” he said again. And continued before she could interrupt with another sarcastic remark. “I promise. Here, let me prove it. I’m going to give you my lightsaber.”

Ahsoka’s voice was decidedly arch. “Just like that?”

Luke nodded. “Just like that. I just want to get back to Mara,” among other things, “and I know you just want to get back to the others and,” here he grinned self-deprecatingly, “probably away from me. We can’t do that if we can’t trust each other long enough to get out of here.”

Ahsoka gazed at him, assessing. Luke could feel her probing his intentions in the Force, but he didn’t know how to let his sincerity—or any emotion—show through the cloud of false Darkness he’d created without taking that shield down entirely.

Finally, she seemed to come to a conclusion. Ahsoka nodded to herself, just the slightest bit, and then said, “Fine. Put it on the ground. _Slowly_.”

Luke stopped himself from breathing a sigh of relief. Keeping his right hand in the air, he slowly reached down and grasped the saber where it hung from his right hip. He could feel the glove tightening around the metal and joints of his fingers as his grip tightened and he unhooked his blade. He reached out to hold it away from himself just as slowly, careful to keep the emitter pointed at the ground as he bent down at the knee, stopping to set it on the floor about a foot in front of him. Slowly, he stood again.

Ahsoka extinguished the shorter and lighter of her two blades and hooked it to her belt in one smooth motion. Then, eyes fixed on him completely, she reached her hand out in front of her, and his lightsaber shot into her grasp.

She inspected it carefully—Luke didn’t even know what one would look for upon capturing an enemy’s saber, to be honest—and then looked at him, brow markings slightly pinched and a question in her eyes. “It’s not corrupted,” she said slowly.

Of course it wasn’t—everything inside Luke shuddered at the thought of inflicting that kind of violence on his crystal, of torturing it until it _bled_ — “Well,” he forced a shrug, “I only Fell two days ago.”

“Oh, silly me, somehow I thought lightsaber corruption was higher on the Dark Side priority list.”

“It’s up there, but it’s still behind mastering maniacal laughter and picking a sufficiently evil-sounding name.”

Ahsoka snorted, and then quickly sobered. “And where, exactly, does torturing and/or corrupting Jedi padawans fall on that list?”

“It doesn’t.” Luke tried to smile and hoped it wouldn’t be too unnerving. “So. Getting back. Wanna take the passage behind you, or the passage behind me?”

“The passage behind you. Among other things, because you’re going to go in first.”

“Of course.” Luke deliberately turned his back to her and walked toward the end of the chamber. Hopefully it would help her feel less threatened—and he was pretty sure he trusted her not to take advantage of the fact that he was unarmed.

A moment later, he heard footsteps a few feet behind him. Ahsoka’s ignited lightsaber hummed in time with her steps, but he didn’t hear it sounding the longer, wider motion of an attack.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Ahsoka’s voice came after about five minutes of walking. The passage, in what was either a very encouraging or completely unencouraging indicator, had absolutely no sidechambers or deviations. It just stretched off into the darkness until one wondered if it would ever end. “You’re acting different than you were with the others. Like, really different.”

Well, yes, because he wasn’t trying to scare the crap out of a sixteen year old, but Luke wasn’t quite sure how to react to her pointing it out. “Oh?”

“Kinda makes one wonder,” Ahsoka drawled, “why that might be. Maybe you were lying earlier, and you’re really just trying to lull me into a false sense of security before you whip out the padawan corruption plan. Or maybe…maybe it’s because you needed to posture for someone before, someone who’s not here right now.”

And from her tone, Luke knew that Ahsoka was definitely leaning on the second possibility.

“Maybe it’s Master Obi-Wan,” she continued “but you’d have to know that if I got back to him, I’d tell him what happened here. So. Why, exactly, do you need that Inquisitor guy convinced you’re way more bloodthirsty and unstable than you actually are?”

Luke stopped, sighed, and turned to face her. He took a step forward, to start to say something, to reassure her of her safety, to make something up about Mara’s intention to betray the other former Hand, but as he did, he saw her flinch back, bring the lightsaber into a tighter guard—

Luke had been undercover as a tortured captive for two weeks, having to act like he was gradually growing Darker and Darker. Two weeks without any kindness except from Mara, and all their interactions measured against the likelihood that someone was watching. She hadn’t let anyone else touch him, but he’d still had to endure the taunts and degradations, the graphic descriptions of how, exactly, the children he was trying to save would be tortured. And now, he had to pretend to be Fallen himself, to want to _hurt people_ , had to fool Ben, had to fool his father, so long as the others were around—

He couldn’t escape that.

But even if it was a risk…he could give himself a brief reprieve. He could give Ahsoka Tano reason not to be afraid of him.

“I need him convinced of that,” Luke began, “because I need him to keep thinking I actually Fell.”

 “I’m sorry, are you saying you’re not a Darksider?”

“Yeah,” Luke said, careful to stay very still and look unthreatening. “It’s a long story, and I can’t tell you all of it, but basically I’m undercover.”

Ahsoka’s skeptical gaze was all the more harsh for its chiaroscuro: the blacks of the shadows contrasted sharply with the reds cast by the Temple and the greens from her lightsaber. “And I assume you have some proof you can offer me?”

“Well, there’s the fact that I haven’t corrupted my lightsaber, if that counts.” What could he offer? It wasn’t like he’d ever met Ahsoka in the future, and he had no idea about any information on the Jedi that might somehow convince her. “Oh, wait—I’m wearing contacts.”

“And poor vision disqualifies you from using the Dark Side….?”

“No—what? No, _colored_ contacts. To make my eyes yellow. Look, I’m going to reach into my robe, take out the case, and take them out, okay? Will that be decent proof?”

Ahsoka stared at him, her gaze evaluating and debating, for a long moment, before she finally said, “Fine.” She brought her lightsabers into a more offensive guard. “But don’t you try anything.”

He didn’t. He just reached into the hidden pocket in the hem of his robe and tried not to react to her watching him, ready to go on the offensive at any second. Instead he screwed open the left-hand cap and awkwardly kept both the cap and the case held in place and level in his hand. Then he stuck his finger into his eye and dragged it out the corner.

His finger came away with the small, yellow bowl of the contact stuck to it. He carefully placed the contact back in the case and screwed on the lid—he was so doomed if he lost it on the dark, dusty floor of an abandoned Sith Temple—before looking back up at Ahsoka, one eye chilling yellow and the other a warm blue.

“You can inspect the case if you want,” Luke offered, holding it up. “See that the contact’s in there and everything.”

Ahsoka held her hand up for it and he tossed it to her, Force assisted for accuracy, and waited while she opened it and poked at the lens. It stuck to her finger and she pulled it out, upside down—and inside out, Luke was pretty sure, they usually were after he removed them—on the tip of her index finger, which she brought up in front of her eye and squinted at.

“And you’re undercover because?”

“They kidnapped Force-sensitive children. Some were kids stolen from their families, some refugees who were living at the Praxeum. The kids have been missing for weeks. This is the best plan we could come up with.”

Ahsoka’s face morphed into a deep frown. “And how did you keep two Darksiders and an evil bounty hunter from realizing it was fake this whole time? When one of them was entirely dedicated to torturing and breaking you? And,” this question was louder, “how did you not actually break?”

From Ahsoka’s expression, she definitely knew that the question was quite possibly rude or uncomfortable, but had decided not to care.

“Look, I seriously can’t tell you everything.” How cagey, he thought even as he said it—maybe he was on his way to making a good Jedi after all. “I _cannot_ let the Inquisitor or the bounty hunter find out before we get the location of the kids from them. But Mara’s undercover too.”

Ahsoka’s brow marks spoke volumes. “ _Really_? After all of the…”

 _The times she gleefully described ravaging your mind and torturing you into insanity_ , Luke suspected was the end of that sentence.

“Yeah, she…she used to be a spy. She’s…really good at her job. But she hasn’t hurt me _at all._ ”

 


End file.
